Thomas Swann Woodcock's manuscript journal of the most popular in American tour of the thirties, with a scrapbook of views along the route from New York to Niagara.
Everyone went to Niagara in the 1830s, and nearly everyone published something about the trip. Woodcock's account differs from most by adding the theme of business to the rhapsody. His journal is punctuated with factories. As a commercial observer he was keen enough to anticipate the collapse of the inflation of the early thirties as well as to record the evidences of immediate prosperity and the spectacular rise in land values in central and western New York.
Woodcock, who was born in Manchester, England, in 1805, came to New York about 1830, and worked as an engraver. A portrait of Andrew Jackson, engraved with a ruling machine and published in New York in 1834, is signed by him. For a time he worked in Philadelphia, and from about 1840 to 1846 was in Brook lyn, established as an engraver and print publisher. While there he was a director of the Brooklyn Apprentices Library, and a portrait of him, painted at that time by George Woodward, is now in the Brooklyn Museum. In 1846 he came into an inheritance and returned to England, living in Manchester until his death in l863.
HTML Conversion by Sara Pierce
16 June 1996